It’s surprising, but according to the report I’ve been researching and writing over the last few months for the local authority body Socitm, most councils don’t have a full picture of the number of customers they have, the volume of enquiries they get through their main access channels, or which are their most popular services by volume and cost-to-serve.

Better served: customer access, efficiency and channel shift published this coming week (15 February) is likely to achieve a certain amount of attention, not least because Socitm has chosen not to pull any punches with the report’s recommendations.

Our key recommendation is that councils should act now to bring all front office customer contact, whether face to face, by phone, through the website or other means, under central management, to enable customer contact to be run to common standards, with comprehensive data collection and customer contact analysis leading to improvement and savings in the cost of delivery.

Key to achieving the savings is reducing overall volumes of contacts by cutting down on ‘avoidable’ contacts, improving processes to reduce the need for multiple contacts, and getting more people to ‘self serve’ their enquiries through the web or automated phone services.

Of course saying this is simple, doing it is another story, not least because centralised customer management challenges the traditional role of council service departments in managing their own customers. The report shows that, where councils have set up corporate customer services functions, key service areas have often been allowed to remain outside it, with the corporate website – the cheapest customer channel and a major potential source of savings – continuing to be managed separately from other customer channels.

Research presented in the report shows that:

• while one English unitary council receives 0.24 face-to-face visits per head of population, another English unitary receives 1.76 visits per head

• the total cost of customer contact (web/phone/face-to-face) in a sample of UK unitary councils varies from over £18 per head of population to under £7

• one unitary council spends £5.6m a year on ‘front office’ customer contact, and a second, with just under half the population, spends £0.9m – less than a fifth of this

• few councils are able to say what their top 20 enquiries are by phone, web and face-to-face, or quote the volumes involved

A number of councils have already grasped the nettle of centralized customer contact management and are starting to reap the rewards. Major case studies featured in the report include: Birmingham City Council, Tameside MBC, Surrey CC, and Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC.

Clearly, once councils have completed the immediate task of cutting this year’s spending to match dramatically reduced budgets, they should be turning their attention to the long term, permanent savings achievable through better customer management. This report might just help them get to first base.

Better served: customer access, efficiency and channel shift is a 96pp report, and can be downloaded from www.socitm.net free of charge by Socitm Insight subscribers from 15 February. It costs £295 for others (£275 Socitm members) and can be ordered from www.socitm.net